Small Business Owner on Speaker Casada’s Remarks on Survivors of Sexual Assault

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – In response to House Speaker Glen Casada’s advice that survivors of sexual assault should “move” out of town, Nettie Kraft, co-owner of The Barbershop Theater in Nashville, issued the following statement through the Tennessee Small Business Alliance:


“As a small business owner, I don’t have the luxury to pick up and move; nor should that be even a solution for survivors of sexual assault. If I employed a teenage girl who bravely confided in me that she had been sexually assaulted, I would never so insensitively suggest that she should just move out of town. I understand that survivors of sexual assault live in a state of perpetual trauma. I know this because I was that teenage girl.


“Speaker Casada, you are in a position of power to protect survivors of sexual assault, not vilify us. It is wrong to abandon survivors and reward the predators.”